You may have seen tonight’s Australian Story about the Toowong breast cancer cluster.

It has raised some very interesting questions about long term exposure to EMF radiation, particularly low-frequency EMF. What are everyone’s thoughts?

The topic of Niccolo Machiavelli came up in random conversation today, along the lines of political dominance and power games. Machiavelli’s works, such as The Prince, have survived in popular culture for hundreds of years. One wonders whether their longevity is due to their extreme viewpoints, or enduring validity?

Hmm. Was doing some reading tonight on the prevalence of breast cancer in Australian women and have to admit I was a bit shocked. It’s amazing to think that you have about a one in 30 chance of contracting this, dropping to less than one in 6 if you have a family history. Apparently there’s gene tests that can be done to see if you have faulty TP53 or BRCA1/2 genes which give you a much increased risk of contraction. But would you want to know? Is having a statistical inclination to contract a disease enough to make plans based on the fact you might contract it?

Long standing joke: The sysadmin was in the pub with his girlfriend and …

Those of us who work in the IT industry will be familiar with the stereotypical geek; equipped with gadgets, fluency in several programming languages and more attuned to the processes of a RHEL box than the female of the species. Their chances of reproduction are low (discounting alien abduction, which of course if you know any sysadmins is something that has to be explicitly mentioned).

I believe this situation is less than desirable for several reasons;

• Most sysadmins have higher than average IQ, and when you get to know them, they usually have an (albeit warped) sense of humour
• Look at the alternative: seriously, the way things are going us chickies are going to have to fight for space in the bathroom with the waxed, plucked, shaved, perfumed, buffed and polished metrosexual men gracing the wine bars and coffee houses. Pah! Less wax, more coding.
• Dress sense is overrated. If a sysadmin could co-ordinate they would have chosen fashion design as a career (kill me now). There is nothing wrong with black. On black.
• In twenty years’ time when your house is networked and your toilet communicates via Firewired USB enhanced terabyte LAN to your toilet paper, who is going to fix everything? Buffboy? I don’t think so!

Well, I hear you say, it’s all been done before in Beauty and the Geek. Supermodels and Geeks pitted together in tasks designed to stretch the skills (and in some cases the bra straps) of both groups.

They’re just not thinking about this clearly. The problem is that Woman has not been documented in UML!

So, for the benefit of all sysadmins out there;

class Woman

	static changeMind()  // this method can be called statically - it requires no instantiation

	private moodSwing()

	public height;
	protected Friends; // aggregation from child class Friends
	private age;
private weight;

Can anyone think of any amendments ?

Well well well, welcome everyone to my random thoughts, annoyances and impressions. Feel free to share your opinions!

And of course what would a blog be without something controversial and divisive to start off with? Mmm let’s see, stem cell research, industrial relations reform… no… they’ve been done before with such poise and journalistic excellence by Today Tonight.

No, I’d like to open the blog with a discussion on a topic very close to my heart: Chocolate!

So, here’s the thing: I swear by Dark chocolate, but in polling random strangers the consensus seems to be for white chocolate. So… Good or Evil? The Dark or the White? Noir ou blanc?